You're facing a stoic crowd at your presentation. How can you inject humor to lighten the mood?

As an experienced public speaker, one of the first steps I take before speaking to any audience is to know who they are. This entails ?? Determine their interests and areas of conflicts ??Determine skills ??Determine their demographics such as gender, age etc This helps me to tailor my content to suit and meet their needs.

Read the room! If they're stoic, maybe there is a reason for it. Your job is to meet people where they are. For me, I double up my energy, move around, try smiler laugh more, ask questions/interact... I see what seems to get a reaction and do more of it.

Before using humor in your presentation make sure you know the background and interest of your audience. You need to understand how they would react to your humor- humor which connects with one audience demographic may not connect with another. One has to understand the mood and gauge the energy of the room. You also need to understand if using humor is something that is appropriate at a particular point of your presentation or not. Also be sure to keep cultural sensibilities of your audience in mind. Humor should never offend. The key is to make sure your humor is inclusive, relatable, timely, and respectable and will connect with the audience in question.

Do your research and know who your audience is. One thing that has been helpful and I have seen in other public speaking opportunities is telling a personal story that can relate to your audience

For a good example of self-deprecating humour used well, you can look at Helen Degeneres and how she always uses humour that places her (or no one) at the expense of the comic and at the same time elevate or flatter the invitee.

Pay attention to your audience’s non-verbal reactions—like smiles, nods, or shifts in body language. These cues can help you gauge whether your timing is hitting the mark or needs adjustment. If you notice a lot of blank stares or distracted looks, it might be time to tweak your approach.

In my speech, I tell a story of having to take a leap. To describe the leap, I take a step forward. To further make my point, I refer to my leap being more than a leap. I say it is taking a leap that looks more like double-dutch jump rope. I actually demonstrate a few steps of the double-dutch technique. This always gets a laugh. When I face a crowd that needs a little jump start, I use this story/lesson sooner and it always gets laughs.

My experience is also that a silent or stoic crowd does not mean they don’t listen and are bored. It happened time and time again to me that I felt everybody was bored to death or impervious to my argument, to see at the end everybody congratulating me. What I read as disinterest was them actually so intensely focused on what I was saying that they stopped moving. Ideally you want to have someone else (for instance, in the organization team) monitor the mood for you and give you gestures, indicating if you need to inject more humor or not.